A few noob questions

kration

kration

kration

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I've always fancied having a PC in the lounge/sitting room for playing games on the TV i.e. for playing my Steam games etc.

I'm not expecting to play at the highest graphic settings, but at OK settings for something like 'Assetto Corsa' for a 42"-ish TV (I'll be getting the TV later as well).

I'm tempted to build something later in the year for about the £350 mark, which seems typical for the builds on here.

So my questions are:

1 - am I being realistic for an OK-ish gaming PC at that price? (Assetto Corsa is probably my benchmark).

2 - I'm on Virgin Broadband with a wireless router. Is connecting the PC to this as simple as connecting a wi-fi phone? If not, how do I do it?

3 - What else can these PC's do apart from play games? I appreciate that this is a very open ended question but what's the potential range of uses out there for a living room PC?
 
The graphics cards listed in Assetto Corsa's recommended spec are more expensive than your entire budget. So no, I doubt you'd be able to build a gaming system even for half-decent settings for £350.

Also bear in mind that you're not going to want to skimp on the case for this system if it's going in the living room, unless you're fine with having an ugly box sticking out like a sore thumb :p

Spec-wise you'd be looking at something like the AMD Kaveri APU with some fast RAM, or an Intel quad core with a mid-range dedicated graphics card.


You could try something like an Intel i5 4430, MSI H97I AC Intel H97 motherboard, 8GB DDR3 RAM and a Nvidia GTX 750 Ti packed into a Silverstone Sugo SG05 case.

Won't leave any budget for an SSD though, so you may have to stick with a mechanical drive - 750GB WD Scorpio Blue. Smaller than a shoe box, doesn't draw much power, has built-in Wi-Fi and will be pretty quiet, pretty much £500.

The GTX 750 Ti is surprisingly good for £100, but it's not got much grunt when you want to start pushing games, and it seems a little redundant to plug this into a 42" TV if you're on low and crap settings.
 
Do you have a gaming rig elsewhere? You could build something for use with Steam Home Streaming, have your gaming rig do the grunt work and just beam the content down to the small rig on the TV.

You could do that on a low-end Kaveri APU or maybe even the cheap-as-chips AMD Kabini boards.

As far as web browsing and media playback as a HTPC you can do that no problem with cheap Kabini boards and low-end Intel i3 CPUs - they may not cut the mustard for gaming, but even the cheap stuff can be pretty powerful for playing Blu-Ray rips and Netflix streaming.
 
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LePhuronn said:
Do you have a gaming rig elsewhere? You could build something for use with Steam Home Streaming, have your gaming rig do the grunt work and just beam the content down to the small rig on the TV.

You could do that on a low-end Kaveri APU or maybe even the cheap-as-chips AMD Kabini boards.

As far as web browsing and media playback as a HTPC you can do that no problem with cheap Kabini boards and low-end Intel i3 CPUs - they may not cut the mustard for gaming, but even the cheap stuff can be pretty powerful for playing Blu-Ray rips and Netflix streaming.
Click to expand...

Good tip. I have a gaming PC elsewhere in the house so could use Steam Home Streaming as you suggest. Is t a bit laggy for games?

But in terms of other stuff it could do is it mainly playing movies/netflix or are there other strings to a mini-system's bow?
 
In Home Streaming on Steam is supposed to be pretty good, but I've not tried it myself. It's part of the standard Steam client now, so you don't need to wait for SteamOS.

As far as "other stuff" goes, it's still a computer, so it can do whatever a computer does. That, of course, is limited by the hardware you put in it, so if you run a budget or low-power CPU then you're going to be largely restricted to budget or low-power functions. The Kabini and APU stuff is very much geared up for graphics and video, so you'll get surprising grunt for media playback and streaming.

So apart from media streaming and playback, surfing and gaming, what exactly else are you thinking of doing with it? I would've thought that covers everything you'd want in a living room PC.
 
The streaming isn't bad. Having two monitors side by side i could see some compression artifacts and i could judge the lag to be ~half a second or less.

Now both systems were side by side and using wireless N so I assume the lag would almost vanish if using Ethernet.

You're not going to win at counterstrike i'd say but you could quite happily play an RPG or even an RTS happily enough.
 
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